Person

Waldman, Anne, 1945-

1945-

Anne Waldman was born on April 2, 1945, in Millville, New Jersey, and raised in New York City's Greenwich Village.

She is an American poet, writer, performer, professor, publisher, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She graduated from Bennington College (B.A., 1966). From 1966 to 1968, she served as Assistant Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City and, from 1968 to 1978, as the Project's Director. In the early 1960s, Waldman became a student of Buddhism. While attending the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 with poet Lewis Warsh, they founded Angel Hair, a small press that produced a magazine of the same name and several smaller books. In 1974, she became one of the co-founders of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University), where she remains a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of Naropa's celebrated Summer Writing Program. Waldman has been a fervent activist for social change, opposing the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility ten miles south of Boulder, Colorado, in the 1970s. In 1980, she married Reed Bye and their son, Edwin Ambrose Bye, was born on October 21, 1980. Nowadays, Waldman and her son perform together. They also created a New York City label Fast Speaking Music, producing multiple albums. Her work has been connected to the Beat Generation poets. Waldman has published more than forty books of poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized, e.g., “Up Late” (1988), “Postmodern American Poetry” (1994), “Women of the Beat Generation” (1996), “All Poets Welcome” (2003), and “Breaking the Cool” (2004). Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, German, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese. She has held residencies at various universities all over the world, including Tokyo, Vienna, and Prague. In 2011, Waldman was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets